On Tue, Dec 24, 2013 at 07:49:28PM +0100, rens wrote: > I understand the technical origin of the behaviour. > Spend +25 yrs in unix. I am so old, that I remember fighting (at my > 40th) with linux 0.79, I think.... > > However, I am questioning if this is what a programming language should do.
Stop thinking of bash as a programming language. It is a command shell. Pipelines invoke multiple processes simultaneously. That's their purpose: to run a bunch of things in parallel, with linked input/output. Each process is just that -- a process. A full-blown separate running program with its own PID, its own private memory and file descriptors, and so on. Moreover, the behavior of bash is constrained by 40+ years of unix shell history. It implements the feature set specified by POSIX, as well as doing its best to be backwards compatible with older versions of itself, and to a much smaller extent, with ksh and sometimes even csh. If you want a shell that breaks out of that mold and does things in a new way, then perhaps you want zsh. If you want an interpreted programming language instead of a shell, there are a bunch to choose from.
